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'SMS of Death' Could Crash Many Mobile Phones
space_in_your_face writes "Research presented at a conference in Germany last week shows that phones don't even have to be smart to be vulnerable to hackers. Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications, a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. The trick works for handsets made by Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax, a popular Indian cell-phone manufacturer."
Peace, at last !
No more stupid ring tones, no more boss (or wife) calls...
GREAT !
Sending the "SMS of Death" has become common practice at theaters in order to finally force people's cell phones to stop ringing.
You might need to define vicinity. One option is to send the programmatically SMS of death to every possible combination of mobile phone numbers within you area code. That might hit a few that have roamed outside your area, but would largely accomplish your task.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein
You can watch the talk over here: http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/27c3-4060-en-attacking_mobile_phones.mp4 or download it via torrent: http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/27c3-4060-en-attacking_mobile_phones.mp4.torrent
1266953+17
I had a cheap Virgin Mobile, and if you looked at it funny it would crash.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And if you're in the UK, you'd be stuck too, since all mobile numbers start 07, and have nothing to do with your local area code which only apply to landlines.
Google voice? (they warn that abuse will get sms privileges taken down) but after that happens, there's always AT&T... maybe start with them... their webpage allows sending of sms for free.
At least you know you'd only be addressing mobile phones (you'd need to be a bit more careful than just 07, but the ranges are on the Wikipedia article for UK numbers).
SMSing the 10,000,000 numbers in a US area code region is going to hit a lot of landlines.
1.This post (and the linked-to article) make a great effort to hide the name of the "conference in Germany". $deity knows why, but the conference was the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3), organised by the Chaos Computer Club.
2.The "SMS of death" was not new in any way - it was well known and discussed back in 2008 at the 25C3. What the researchers effectively showed was that the manufacturers and the GSM networks had *still* not fixed the problem, even years later!
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
there's always AT&T... maybe start with them... their webpage allows sending of sms for free.
...and there you go. (SMSes of death * shellscript) / unsecured wifi = weapon of mass pwnage.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
For specific purposes carriers may provision SMSC (short message service centers) and GMSC (gateway message service centers) to send binary data to interact with applications on the mobiles.
In practice, this is very rare because the carriers have known for a long time that binary payloads may be susceptible to misuse for malicious reasons. Thus, very few originators of short messages are permitted to send binary payloads (or at least when I was doing this a few years ago, maybe now it's different).
This is probably now much of an issue because it's really quite difficult to get binary sms provisioning from carriers (AT&T, TMO, etc.) because you need to have a contract with special stipulations about what the originating messages will be used for. These are looked at closely by carriers.
In North America, phone numbers are always in the form NXX-NXX-XXXX, with N being a digit from 2-9 and X being a digit from 0-9.
Instead of 10,000,000,000 permutations, you only have 6,400,000,000
It is called NANPA and there are a few other reserved numbers mixed in (for example, in an NXX group, both Xs can not be 1 to avoid confusion with N11 services such as 911).
Wikipedia also has a good article about this.
Anyone know what to put in the message? Just for research purposes....